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Munich police have investigated € 80,000 from a bank in Dubai for the home of Jan Marsalek’s friend in Munich, which could confirm that it was linked to a former Wirecard fugitive.
The 41-year-old Austrian he fled in June 2020 just days before Wirecard collapsed after admitting that € 1.9bn of cash and half of its revenue was non-existent. Marsalek, who is on the list of most wanted by Interpol, has been accused of “fraud of billions” by Munich representatives.
The collapse of a company that once paid for electricity, which at its peak in 2018 was a member of the Dax blue block worth € 24bn, is one of the biggest scandals in Europe after the war.
Marsalek left his former friend in Munich, who questioned him several times at the police station, according to people who had been questioned about the investigation. When Marsalek and her boyfriend were dating, she could take the opportunity to get married and refuse to testify.
Marsalek’s girlfriend was renting a nice house in Munich, paying about 6,600 rent a month. Earlier this year, the landlord received a fine of around € 80,000, representing a 12-month rent.
The money was withdrawn from a bank account in Dubai from a man with an Arabic name, and he came with the name “für Jan” (“instead of Jan”). The money was linked to a bank account used to hold tenants, which is different from the monthly rent, people reported in the Financial Times. The owner of the house told police he had received it, according to the residents.
A spokesman for the Munich prosecutor’s office told FT that investigators had received a suspicious report from the landlord’s bank at the time, and declined to comment further on the charges, which were initially reported by Products.
It is not known whether the person whose name was sent in his name exists, or whether he was the name Marsalek. The very name of the sender is listed as the client of one of the Asian business partners in Wirecard in one of the texts that KPMG reviewed on Wirecard.
Marsalek’s lawyers and a friend did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Marsalek is one of the most suspicious white collars in the world. One day since the author of Wirecard EY in June 2020 refused to sign the 2019 team results, Marsalek took a taxi to a small airport in Austria, where he boarded a government plane for which he paid a fee, according to a document seen by Austrian police seeing FT.
He flew to Minsk, where his search was lost. “We will find him,” Munich Governor Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl told lawmakers when parliament questioned the scandal earlier this year.